DARwIn-OP robot is open source

This robot kicking the beer can around in this video is known as DARwin-OP. This the result of an Open Platform Humanoid Project sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the United States and developed by RoMeLa at Virginia Tech with collaboration with University of Pennsylvania, Purdue University and Robotis Co., based on the award winning DARwIn series humanoid robots in development since 2004.

DARwIn-OP is a true open platform where users are encouraged to modify it in both hardware and software, and various software implementations are possible (C++, Python, LabVIEW, MATLAB, etc.) The open source hardware is not only user serviceable thanks to its modular design, but also can be fabricated by the user. Publicly open CAD files for all of its parts, and instructions manuals for fabrication and assembly are available on-line for free.

We found the DARwIn-OP listing for $12,000 as a special order from Trosson Robotics. For that price, we’d expect him to retrieve the beer and open it, not just kick the car around. It would have been a particularly interesting AI learning experiment had DARwIn picked the can up and opened it after kicking it around the floor…

Comments

I often laugh at the way creators of some system describe their own project. You have to have a very creative definition of “affordable” to use that term in reference to a $12,000 product.

I’ve also seen student designs which claimed to be efficient designs oriented towards low cost, but I quickly found a couple of bad design choices. One was using a premium-priced 32-channel mux chip which costs significantly more than a pair of 16-channel mux chips (way more than the placement cost could possibly be). Considering that the inputs were spread all across the board on that design, two 16-channel chips would have even shortened the length of the traces. But, hey, when you’re describing your own project design to your professor, I guess you can write the most glowing review that you want.